Closing Near You...

This Tuesday sees the release of what the Post Office have called “Area 5 Plan” – essentially this is the closure programe for large parts of West Central Scotland out with the Glasgow area. This means that closures will be announced for Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and (very much on our doorstep) Renfrewshire.
The most interesting aspect of this is the random jockeying that has been going on in the Renfrewshire media, mostly played out in the letters page’s of the Paisley Daily Express. One letter caught my eye in April, I can’t remember who wrote it, but he said that any scare stories, which he believed were put around by the SNP, that appeared in the media were nonsense, and that there would be no post office closures in Paisley or Renfrewshire. Im not sure where he got his information from, but everywhere else had suffered Post Office closures, therefore the law of averages says, no dictates, that there will be closures here to. This started some of the afore mentioned jockeying with the SNP saying that this person didn’t know what he was talking about, and that he was clearly a Labour man.
Whatever happens on Tuesday, I hope that the local Labour politicians know who to blame. In Private Eye, date April 4th 2008, they ran an article which placed the blame at the door of the now former Chancellor, Gordon Brown…
“The current policy originates in the governments Shareholder Executive, announced by Gordon Brown in 2002 with the task to “better fulfill (the government’s) role as shareholder” of 25 publicly-owned companies like Royal Mail. Its target, on which bosses bonuses depended, was to increase the value of the six largest companies by £1bn by 2007.
Out went any notion that public corporations were also there to provide a public service. The men bought in for the job, first led by ex-CSFB investment banker Richard Gillingwater and now by former Deutsche Bank analyst Stephen Lovegrove, duly hit the target.
This was achieved largely by boosting the financial (if not service) results at Royal Mail following the installation of senior management, including chief executive Adam Crozier on multi million bonuses for boosting profits without penalty for service shortcomings. Unsuprisingly under Crozier & co, closures and redundancies have been the order of the day.”
The article goes on to outline that the Shareholder executive has a financial interest in cutting costs, and that they advise ministers on the companies that they “run” (into the ground).
So dear reader, if you see a New Labour MP, MSP or councilor complaining about the cuts on Tuesday, or any time soon, remind them that they are at fault for the backdoor privatization of the Post Office.
PS: Adam Crozier is the former Chief executive of the FA, who appointed Sven-Goran Eriksson. He acknowledged that there was corruption at her heart of football, only to be put in his place by the Premierships chairmen. The Chairman of the Post Office is the former Chief Executive of Leeds United, Alan Leighton. His involvement in the demise of Leeds from the Premiership is detailed in the book “Broken Dreams” by Tom Boyer